ice flight icy

Another artfight piece! (that I forgot to post oops-)

I got the idea from cowcatchers old locomotives used to have.

Anyways, yesterday I uploaded the model to Thingiverse, and just hours after uploading it, the Community Relationship Manager of the whole website left a comment suggesting I enter the model into a competition that's currently being held on the site.

So I did... and now it's in third place not even a day later. First place is $500, but the competition still has a month to go.

Then the Community Manager contacted me again, telling me they want to feature my model in an upcoming design promotion.

Just, what is happening? I mostly made this thing for myself in, like, an hour, and now it's suddenly super popular? This is all a little bit overwhelming 😵‍💫

Other models I worked on for weeks didn't get nearly as popular. I swear, it's impossible to predict what people will like.

Anyways, if you want to print the wheel guards yourself, you can get the model here or here.

I also made a quiet version you can stick furniture felt pads on.

Louder for the people in the back:

... you cannot tell what an artist is going to be like personally from being very familiar with their art.

“So... We got the exploding diarrhea. Here's my advice for anyone who doesn't have it yet:

It's going to take a minute for the government to pin down where this is coming from, and then issue a recall, because the FDA has been gutted. But, I can tell you, without a shadow of a doubt : this is coming from Taylor Farms produce, and you will see them recalled.

You'll want to avoid all Taylor Farms produce in the grocery store. They supply McDonalds, KFC, Pizza Hut, about any fast food place you can think of.

Raspberries, watermelons, cilantro, and the veggies you're hearing about are not causing this many people to get sick. It's the shredded lettuce, specifically, that's the problem. But, you'll want to stay away from every type of produce this company puts out, because one strand of shredded lettuce is all it takes to contaminate bushels.

Taylor Farms is the source. Taco Bell proactively pulled their produce from their restaurants. You're going to see other fast food places doing this, and probably will see that before the government names a source. The FDA knows this, but they can't come out and tell us all until there's proof, which takes resources and research, which takes manpower, but the FDA has been cut by about 20-30%

During the Biden term, onions at McDonald's had ecoli. We knew this because DNA testing was done quickly and they were able to narrow it down to one place that caused the outbreak. And, it was traced back to Taylor Farms. This isn't going to be solved as quickly though.

When you get this, make a virtual appointment to your PCP - a "same day sick" appointment. Tell them someone in your family just tested for this and was positive and was prescribed Bactrim. If you go in person, they're probably going to make you poop in a cup and wait until results come back to prescribe.

You'll know when you get this. Trust me on all of this.

You'll want to stay hydrated because this parasite damages the lining of the small intestine. Your small intestine, in turn, secretes more water into the gut, and less nutrients and liquid are able to remain in the body. So no matter how much you shit, you're going to want to drink. A day of this leads to dehydration if you don't increase your fluid intake, and a few days will land you in the hospital.

If you have headaches, weakness, muscle cramps, dizziness, or an increase heart rate - hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. Go to the ER for fluids if you can't drink enough.

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk. Brought to you by America's 250 birthday celebrations, workforce reduction in the FDA and CDC, and viewers like you.

Please feel free to share this.

And, MAGA - don't blow up the comment section. I argued with y'all on COVID bc I was afraid y'all would die, but I really don't care if you get explosive diarrhea.

However, per CNN and numerous other news outlets, as of Thursday afternoon, the outbreak has been at least partially traced to lettuce supplied to Taco Bell from Taylor Farms, in Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky.

Other states and/or businesses could have received the same contaminated lettuce, or there could be multiple simultaneous outbreaks with different sources: currently, it's not clear.

Murderbot describes Preservation as using a “complicated barter system.” The funniest (to me) interpretation of this is just that they use cash and MB has never seen actual for real physical paper/metal cash before (what is currency but complicated barter?). However it’s fun to flex the cultural worldbuilding imagination and say, what if the Preservation economy is structured as a LETS, which is also, conceptually, sort of, a complicated barter system.

LETS stands for Local Exchange Trading System and has been implemented in a few places in recent decades. At its core it’s a different mode of conceptualizing debt.

Basically, the way we treat money now is as a commodity: it is zero-sum Stuff that we hoard and accumulate. You earn it and then you spend it. It’s based on the logic of scarcity. A LETS treats the idea of money as more like debt: you create more by borrowing it from a conceptual pool. You spend it, and then you earn it. It’s based on the logic of abundance.

To my understanding, you “borrow” a certain number of Green Dollars (the LETS monetary system discussed in the specific example I attended a lecture on) from the central tracking system. You can use that to pay for whatever good or service you want. Then, you are obligated to do that many “Green Dollars” worth of goods or services for that person (or someone else, depending) at some point to balance the ledger.

You can’t be denied a “loan” if you’re in the red; that’s not how it works. You declare that you’re using X amount of Green Dollars, there’s no application/denial system. BUT if you have a history of not putting it back into the community, people can stop doing business with you. It’s an economy based on reciprocity and reputation.

Essentially, spending money is not so much spending money, it’s making a promise to put this much value back into the community at some point in the future.

It has only ever been implemented on fairly small and local scales, and usually as a supplement to the “regular” economy; I think to make it work on a planetary scale, there would need to be a central governmental “bank” keeping track (election to the oversight of which is probably a critically important job) as well as designated government-run “sinks” where people can pay to get stuff like food and health care without being expected to return an equivalent amount because what they need is far more than what they can return.

You can get rich by providing a good or service everyone wants, but the currency you’re rich in is basically a promise to pay you back in some form, and then the things that people do for you. People can transfer Green Dollar debt too: if X does a service for Y, then Y does a service for Z, Y can agree to accept the repayment via Z doing a service for X if X has something Z wants more than Y does. The goal is to create networks of inter-reliance where debt is not a bad thing but rather a representation of what we owe to each other and to society.

Local communities may act more like gift economies where “everything comes out in the wash” anyway, and direct trade of items or services can sometimes be expedient, but the LETS and its central bank tracking people’s yet-unpaid debts and repayments is the primary planetary economic system. There are a bunch of committees around this.

Unrelatedly to the LETS thing I imagine Preservation having a “service tax” akin to jury duty where every once in a while you are called up to spend the day washing dishes at the communal free food court or something. Also a looooot of industrial scale food production is done by ag-bots. Also it’s extremely common and kind of culturally expected that most people grow some food themselves, whether it’s a window-box of herbs or a fruit tree they tend or a vegetable garden. Also also surplus food is stored in the government-owned cryo-pods that the Pressy colonists were in—if they can keep a human alive in cryo stasis for 200 years they can keep fruit and vegetables fresh for as long as needed, so if a food crisis ever comes up the government has a stockpile. I think these are important ways that labor and goods get distributed also.

Iness Rychlik ~ Victorian Erotica with Subtle Cruelty

The BeeKeeper

Love and Devotion

The Instruments of Torture

Impatient

He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not

Thorns

A Scene of Silent Despair

Greed

Charley Harper (USA, 1922-2007)

Serengheti Spaghetti, 1979